Shut down in 2019, Google+ was never really a favorite for most in the social media landscape. However, during today’s massive and extended Facebook outage, Google+ came to mind for quite a few people.
On Twitter this afternoon, Google+ picked up some steam with thousands of tweets referencing the now-defunct social network in the aftermath of the Facebook outage. Twitter’s recap of the trend summarizes that quite a few users took Facebook’s downtime to wonder whether Google+ might have been a better alternative had it still been around.
As many social media services report outages, some wonder if they would have turned to Google+ had the service not been shut down in 2019.
Looking through the trend on Twitter, there are certainly plenty of users who were considering whether or not Google+ would have been a good alternative, but seemingly more common were cracks at the platform’s expense.
Google+ was, of course, shut down in 2019 following years of being mocked by many. The final dagger, though, turned out to be a huge security breach that exposed data of over 50 million users. Google’s silence on that matter also prompted a later class-action lawsuit. Somewhat ironically, a massive Facebook data breach affecting over 1 billion was reported alongside today’s outage, but the two may not be related and the breach may not even be legitimate. Rather, the outage seems to be related only to DNS and BGP.
To its credit, Google+ had few memorable outages during its life. So at least it had one thing going for it.
More on Google+:
- Nearly 2M former Google+ users can claim their $2.15 payout from class-action lawsuit
- Google+ will shut down for consumers on April 2nd
- As Google+ goes dark, here’s what the social network meant to the 9to5Google team
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